Here's Why Hugging White Supremacists Is Counterproductive to Justice

Do Better is an op-ed column by writer Lincoln Anthony Blades that debunks fallacies regarding the politics of race, culture, and society — because if we all knew better, we'd do better.

On October 19, racist Richard Spencer gave a pro-white nationalist speech at the University of Florida. The event was a platform for another one of Spencer’s prejudiced tirades, which are thinly masked as “identitarian” ideology and fortified under the guise of free speech, and was flooded by counterprotesters and supporters.

There, Randy Furniss, clad in a white shirt adorned with swastikas, found himself alone and surrounded by counterprotesters. As Furniss attempted cross through the crowd with his hands in his pockets, he was met with screams of “Go home, Nazi scum!” when a man in a green hoodie appeared and proceeded to punch him in the face.

Video shows the hooded attacker quickly disappearing into the crowd as Furniss, clearly shaken, attempted to continue on his path while his mouth filled with blood and began dripping down his chin. From the crowd emerged Aaron Courtney, a 31-year-old high school football coach from Gainesville, Florida, who approached Furniss and gave him a tight bear hug while asking, “Why don’t you like me, dog?” Furniss initially resisted, but Courtney persisted, asking, “Why do you hate me?”

Once footage of this embrace hit the Internet, the praise began. When questioned about his motivation to hug a man wearing swastikas, Courtney told The New York Daily News, “I could have hit him, I could have hurt him...but something in me said, ‘You know what? He just needs love,’” he said. “I heard God whisper in my ear, ‘You changed his life.’”

After Courtney’s embrace, another black man named Julius Long reportedly escorted Furniss through the enraged crowd to take pictures with him, which were promptly posted to Facebook by Long’s father with the hashtag #loveconquershate. His post was shared over 24,000 times.

When Long was questioned about his motivation, he told CTV’s Your Morning, “What I was witnessing was reverse racism.” He likened the attack on Furniss to the beatings black men, women, and children suffered throughout the civil rights movement. Long added that he even met up with Furniss the next day to help him file a police report against the people who confronted him, and then the two ate together at a local soul food restaurant. “Love doesn’t have a color,” he said.

Courtney’s hug with Furniss went viral, while big news from the same event went underreported: That day, three of Spencer’s supporters — all white men — were arrested for the attempted murder of counterprotesters. Colton Fears, William Fears, and Tyler Tenbrink were apprehended by Gainesville police after Tenbrink, hours earlier, pulled a gun and shot at protesters while the Fears brothers threw up Nazi salutes and shouted pro-Hitler chants.

So why is it that the befriending of white nationalists has gained more traction than pointedly racist violence? Perhaps because, collectively, we don’t spend nearly enough time assessing the risk they represent to our society. On October 19 — the same day as Spencer’s University of Florida speech — ProPublica released a report about a violent white nationalist group that has been spreading nationwide with little attention from law enforcement despite the scale and gravity of their violence. The Rise Above Movement (RAM) has been notably active in recent months in cities like Berkeley, San Bernardino, and Charlottesville and is comprised of white men, some of whom have been convicted of committing violent crimes against minorities. They routinely work alongside some of the nation’s deadliest white supremacist factions, like the Hammerskin Nation, the largest Nazi gang in America, who, according to ProPublica, “have been tied to at least nine murders in four states, including a 2012 massacre at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin.” They’ve paired with the founder of the white supremacist faction Identity Evropa, whose leader once brutally assaulted a taxicab driver and robbed him at gunpoint. “Fundamentally, RAM operates like an alt-right street-fighting club,” Oren Segal, director of the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism, explained to ProPublica.

While racists are framed as “deplorable,” there is a social reticence from the silent majority to label them as imminently dangerous domestic terrorists, despite the fact that the FBI is currently investigating over 1,000 white supremacist domestic-terror cases, and findings from a recent poll reported that military leaders see white nationalists as a bigger threat than ISIS. Unlike Germany’s attempts to rectify its past relationship with Nazism, America has yet to reconcile the true danger of white nationalists and the people who violently defend its ideals.

The face of terror in America is the angry white man who feels disillusioned by advancing multiculturalism and uses violence as his measure of reversing all social progress. The number of hate crimes in the U.S. continues to rise, and this moment requires powerful solutions in order to protect lives. People who perpetuate hate and threaten innocent lives aren’t deserving of hugs.

But citizen-initiated violence against racist groups isn’t the answer, either. Assault is a criminal offense, and if the recent charges against DeAndre Harris, the young black man who was beaten by white nationalists in Charlottesville, has taught us anything, it’s that law enforcement will gladly find a way to prosecute and imprison “protesters,” even in ostensibly justifiable situations (like finding yourself surrounded by a group of violent white nationalists). There are measures of propelling justice without enacting a bootleg Daryl Davis routine. Organizing nonviolent counterprotests and shouting down racism wherever it’s given a platform is far more important than literally embracing the people who preach ethnic cleansing and black genocide. Hate must be met first with intolerance.

The viral hug and befriending of Spencer’s supporter precipitates important questions that we, as black folks, must address within our community. We must consider why some are so eager to undermine the threats we face with acts of performative altruism, as well as calling out the cowards in black evangelical class who offer forgiveness without even demanding any show of reconciliation or remorse, while using Martin Luther King Jr. quotes about love and simultaneously sidestepping the fact that he was assassinated by a white nationalist. But before we can address those questions as a collective community, we should be united in this one simple point: There isn’t a damn thing cute about hugging Nazis — and it needs to stop.